Cynical/realist take: Take responsibility and then hope your bosses already love you, you can immediately both come with a way to prevent it from happening again, and convince them to give you the resources to implement it. Otherwise your responsibility is, unfortunately, just blood in the water for someone else to do all of that to protect the company against you and springboard their reputation on the descent of yours. There were already senior people scheming to take over your department from your bosses, now they have an excuse.

This seems like an absolutely horrid way of working or doing 'office politics'.

Yes, and I personally have worked in environments that do just that. They said they didn't, but with management "personalities" plus stack ranking, you know damn well that they did.

And the guy who doesn't take responsibility gets promoted. Employees are not responsible for failures of management to set a good culture.

The Gervais/Peter Principle is alive and well in many orgs. That doesn't mean that when you have the prerogative to change the culture, you just give up.

I realize that isn't an easy thing to do. Often the best bet is to just jump around till you find a company that isn't a cultural superfund site.

Not in healthy organizations, they don't.

You can work an entire career and maybe enjoy life in one healthy organization in that entire time even if you work in a variety of companies. It just isn't that common, though of course voicing the _ideals_ is very, very common.

Once you reach a certain size there are surprisingly few healthy organization, most of them turn into externalization engines with 4 beats per year.

I love it when I share a mental model with someone in the wild.

Way more fun argument: Outages just, uh… uh… find a way.